ZWO Seestar 50

[Giles_B]

3 hours ago, squipper said:

 just turned on my s50 while there are breaks in the clouds and this happened, seestar sS50 turns to jupiter red & blue box merge as 1 it says identifying  then centering 5th attempt any idea what it means 

If the image is obstructed, the stars are trailing because of the wind or the clouds interfere with plate solving, the SS can take a few goes to centre the image. 5 tries is not unprecedented.

[squipper]

Thank for that info will put it down to  a thick user error on my part   thought i had damaged it 

 

[powerlord]

A bit of a different one.

I took the S50 up to scotland to see the family at xmas. They live in a high village in central scotland, where you have amazing views to the NW - looking down over the whole of central scotland and then beyond up to the mountains.

And though there was not a single time in the week I could see a single star, one afternoon the galeforce winds and rain stopped, and the sun came out just long enough to get a great view. So I set the S50 up and shot some video.

As it only shoots video at 12fps or so, I put it through Final Cut Pro and used optical flow to tween the frames up to 60fps. I've shot a few intro shots on my phone to try and demonstrate how far away stuff is.

The bridge you will see is the Erskine Bridge over the Clyde. It's 30 miles away - the BA plane you see is coming into land at Glasgow airport to the left of it. Later you will see a triangular mountain in the distance - that's one of the closer ones you can see  - Ben Lomond: 50 miles away, The Cobbler about 60 miles away. I like the last shot where we are looking down on the blades of a wind turbine popping up over a field.

Funny enough the family were more impressed with that than most of the astro shots I share. It's the first time ever anyone has noticed you can see Ersike bridge for example.

 

[John_D]

Interesting thanks. Does the S50 have any options to automatically create Gigapan or 360 degree images?

[Dave scutt]

I was imagining for just under an hour, but only says 5 minute's 

[jweaver100]

After watching just about every Youtube video, i couldn't resist any longer. I have just ordered a S50 directly from Seestar. I was going to wait for stock in UK, but Seestar claim now to be shipping in real time, so there shouldn't be a delay.

Just so I am ready, what sort of amounts have people been paying in VAT/Duty?

I am a total novice... I have owned a telescope before (Celestron) but found the entire experience really disappointing.. Looking at Saturn and Jupiter was awe inspiring but I didn't ever really see anything of interest.. So the S50 is exactly what I have been looking for to scratch my astronomy itch..

As I have a 3D printer, I have been making accessories ready for delivery... I have made a Bahtinov Mask and I am not actually clear what it does, or how its used on the S50? I believe its something to do with auto focus.. But how exactly would you use it on the S50 which has auto-focus?

Thanks in advance for what is certainly a very simple (stupid?) question.

 

Cheers all

Jon

 

 

[Cosmic Geoff]

10 hours ago, jweaver100 said:

As I have a 3D printer, I have been making accessories ready for delivery... I have made a Bahtinov Mask and I am not actually clear what it does, or how its used on the S50? I believe its something to do with auto focus.. But how exactly would you use it on the S50 which has auto-focus?

The autofocus works fine without a Bahtinov mask.  I have not obtained or made any accessories for my S50, which I received in September. The only sensible accessories IMHO are a taller tripod, or alternatively a 3/8" spacer/adapter to mount it on a standard astro tripod.  And a reflective strip so you can see where the S50 is pointing in the dark.

Edited January 6 by Cosmic Geoff

[jweaver100]

Can i ask a question... I have a perfect spot for a telescope.. its a raised platform (balcony) which gives an almost full view of the sky and live in a fairly rural area, so I have almost no light pollution..

The only problem is that it has a Security light.... Lets assume the S50 is stacking photos for a long period.. What would happen if the security light came on during one of the 'frames? Would the software recognize this and discard it... Or would it try to 'stack' it with the others affecting the quality?

Edited January 8 by jweaver100

[Giles_B]

It would depend on the algorithm that the automatic stacking uses - it appears to discard frames when it detects no stars, but I assume every other frame is included. If this is the case then the "bright" photo would lighten the overall stack a bit, but eventually it would average out over a long period. If you were to manually stack the FITS the you could avoid stacking the offending frames by choosing a stacking alogirthm that would discard the frames with the lowest numbers of stars.

The practical limit of the averaging out effect of including every frame would be the amount of rotation in the stacked image. How quickly this is a problem will depend on how high in the sky the object you are imaging is. As a rule of thumb, I find that once you go beyond an hour the stacked image starts to show a distracting amount of rotation.

 

[PaulM]

 

39 minutes ago, jweaver100 said:

Can i ask a question... I have a perfect spot for a telescope.. its a raised platform (balcony) which gives an almost full view of the sky and live in a fairly rural area, so I have almost no light pollution..

The only problem is that it has a Security light.... Lets assume the S50 is stacking photos for a long period.. What would happen if the security light came on during one of the 'frames? Would the software recognize this and discard it... Or would it try to 'stack' it with the others affecting the quality?

Been using my S50 for about a week now, from what I can see and transferred from the S50 in terms of files and have read you get a single JPEG stacked image form the subs and a FITs file, you do not get individual sub files to stack, apparently the early\beta release provided these and most of the YouTube videos are now out of date due to this, you cannot stack the individual subs, happy to be corrected on this as it would be good to do so

[Cosmic Geoff]

53 minutes ago, jweaver100 said:

The only problem is that it has a Security light.... Lets assume the S50 is stacking photos for a long period.. What would happen if the security light came on during one of the 'frames? Would the software recognize this and discard it... Or would it try to 'stack' it with the others affecting the quality?

With the recent software versions you get three versions of the stack : a processed image on your smartphone, a composite fits file on the S50, and (if you select the option) a set of fits files, one for each exposure.

The practical effect of this re your query is as follows: I imaged NGC2024 and found that the Iphone image had a pair of white lines across it - presumably an airplane track.  On investigation I found that the white lines appeared on only ONE sub out of about 200, and after deleting that one I processed the files with Deep Sky Stacker and Siril, to get a slightly enhanced image with no white lines.

[Dave scutt]

A few new items today.

A Neewer tripod leverer, and a skywatcher star adventure tripod .

[Dave scutt]

Would definitely recommend one, take's second's level

[ObscuredView]

Just ordered one from FLO and had order completed and on its way mail. 
V excited.

[John Wick]

On 05/01/2024 at 23:40, jweaver100 said:

After watching just about every Youtube video, i couldn't resist any longer. I have just ordered a S50 directly from Seestar. I was going to wait for stock in UK, but Seestar claim now to be shipping in real time, so there shouldn't be a delay.

Just so I am ready, what sort of amounts have people been paying in VAT/Duty?

I am a total novice... I have owned a telescope before (Celestron) but found the entire experience really disappointing.. Looking at Saturn and Jupiter was awe inspiring but I didn't ever really see anything of interest.. So the S50 is exactly what I have been looking for to scratch my astronomy itch..

As I have a 3D printer, I have been making accessories ready for delivery... I have made a Bahtinov Mask and I am not actually clear what it does, or how its used on the S50? I believe its something to do with auto focus.. But how exactly would you use it on the S50 which has auto-focus?

Thanks in advance for what is certainly a very simple (stupid?) question.

 

Cheers all

Jon

 

 

I paid £109 direct to DHL when they made contact about Duty and VAT etc From order direct from ZWO to UK delivery was 3 weeks, beginning of December

Edited January 10 by John Wick

[WiltsStarGazer]

24 minutes ago, John Wick said:

I paid £109 direct to DHL when they made contact about Duty and VAT etc From order direct from ZWO to UK delivery was 3 weeks, beginning of December

With current exchange rates, £392.67 for the Seestar plus £109.00 in duties makes it only £49 cheaper than delivered  price from FLO.

Mine was delivered in three days in the week before Christmas.

IMO it was worth the extra to deal with a trusted company in this country and not having to worry about sending it back to China if anything went wrong.

Edited January 10 by WiltsStarGazer
Additional information.

[Giles_B]

On 08/01/2024 at 12:35, PaulM said:

 

Been using my S50 for about a week now, from what I can see and transferred from the S50 in terms of files and have read you get a single JPEG stacked image form the subs and a FITs file, you do not get individual sub files to stack, apparently the early\beta release provided these and most of the YouTube videos are now out of date due to this, you cannot stack the individual subs, happy to be corrected on this as it would be good to do so

With respect this is incorrect - "Save each frame" in the 'advanced options' saves the individual subs - if you don't have this checked you will only get a a stacked image.

I realise @Cosmic Geoff has pointed this out, but I thought it was worth being explicit about this for anyone else reading the thread!

[Elp]

This "EQ" mode topic might be interesting. Note if you attempt this you're doing so at your own risk as the thread mentions the gears are made of plastic and many people have raised questions about it.

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/904547-say-no-more-field-rotations-for-the-seestar-s50/

 

[tonyglossop]

Tried out both Seestars together last night,

 

[DaveL59]

49 minutes ago, Elp said:

This "EQ" mode topic might be interesting. Note if you attempt this you're doing so at your own risk as the thread mentions the gears are made of plastic and many people have raised questions about it.

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/904547-say-no-more-field-rotations-for-the-seestar-s50/

 

An interesting idea which seems to work, albeit we don't yet know the long term effect on the gearing. I'd actually wondered if you could run the S50 mounted onto a proper EQ mount so that its not doing anything at all with the gearing other than holding position as the EQ5 would then be taking care of the tracking. I'll probably never end up trying that tho since as-is it seems to do what I want and with such ease of setting up 😄 

[Elp]

Thought I'd just post it as the alt az and the short 10s exposures are its main limiting factors, if these weren't there I'd definitely get one as a likely replacement for most of what I have (last session I setup then soon broke down my C6 as the forecast didn't materialise, so a Seestar would be a no hassle alternative).  Again I reiterate, the Seestar is not designed to be used in such a fashion (EQ mode) therefore would likely not be mechanically sound to do so, do so at your own risk.

 

Edited January 10 by Elp

[Elp]

26 minutes ago, DaveL59 said:

if you could run the S50 mounted onto a proper EQ mount so that its not doing anything at all with the gearing

If you could lock both axis that would be better. But then by using it this way mounted onto an EQ mount youre not really gaining anything, better to just use a normal dedicated imaging setup, and use the Seestar as it was designed to be used.

[happy-kat]

Looking at images shared from seestar S50 data they are great. It's quite amazing really what it produces, the tracking looks quite consistent too.

[Cosmic Geoff]

On 10/01/2024 at 15:50, Elp said:

and the short 10s exposures are its main limiting factors,

It now has the option of 20sec and 30 sec exposures in the advanced settings.

[Elp]

10 minutes ago, Cosmic Geoff said:

It now has the option of 20sec and 30 sec exposures in the advanced settings.

Now that is interesting. How does it cope with tracking at these exposures? Also has anyone kept a log of hours imaged and exposure time lost per session. Seriously thinking of getting one as a no nonsense AP setup rather than spending time setting up the "serious" stuff.